This weekend I will be giving a lecture at the UCCA in 798 about Urban Liveability and the bicycle. As many of you may know I come from an architecture / urban design background and over the past 6 months I have been giving a lot of thought to this city and its bicycle culture.

As we all know Beijing was once the ultimate bicycle city with around 80% of its residents using the bicycle to move around. These days ridership is down to 20% as cyclists ditch the bike in favor of the car. Thousands of new cars are hitting the streets in Beijing every week and are turning Beijing into the new ‚car kingdom‘.

At the same time Beijing is getting serious about becoming a World City and improving the liveability of the capital for its residents. The trend in the most liveable cities in the world is shifting away from a focus on the automobile for urban mobility in city centers and towards more sustainable and people friendly forms of transportation such as the bicycle.

Beijing is now at the cross roads with its bicycle culture in decline- it can let wither and die or it can start to promote Bicycling 2.0 in the city and assist in a more rapid transition to a World class liveable city.

This entry was posted on Sonntag, Juni 20th, 2010 at 01:02 and is filed under Beijing, China, Cycling, Green. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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